The Knowledge of Death

For the first ten days, the only knowledge of the uprising in North Viet Nam came from the Communist radio itself (TIME, Nov. 26), which described the revolt in heavily Catholic Nghean province as "prepared long in advance" by "reactionary hooligans . . . taking advantage of our mistakes in the application of land reform."

Conducted by Party Boss Truong Chinh, the North Vietnamese land reform was a bloody business in which a whole uniformed army of reformers had marched into peasant areas, declared martial law, stripped tiny landholders of their farms, and shipped thousands off to prison or death indiscriminately. When its harvest turned out to be only unrest and barren rice fields, Dictator Ho Chi Minh tried to mend the error by firing Party Boss Truong and circulating a letter which promised drastic liberalization of his regime. Last week, at the sprawling seaport town of Tourane, a boatload of refugees from the Communist North stepped ashore in free South Viet Nam to tell a fuller story of the anti-Red uprisings.

"We had long wanted to revolt," said a young man named Nguyen Khai Diem. "But we started the uprising in earnest when we received the letter from Chairman Ho saying that freedom was being given back to the people, and we found that it was not."

"How did you fight them?" he was asked. "First we used our hands; then we used sticks."

The most serious revolts, according to Nguyen, were in the predominately Catholic area around Quynh Luu, but other refugees had told him that there were similar uprisings in the suburbs of Hanoi itself, in Phat Diem, Thanh Hoa and Vinh. In many cases, solidly Buddhist peasants were prevented from joining their Catholic co-rebels only by hastily deployed units of the Viet Minh army.

They fought in ignorance of the rest of the world; they had not even heard of the revolt in Hungary. "We knew nothing of the freedom in the South," said Nguyen. "We did not know that the French had already left South Viet Nam. They told us that here there was no food, that all the women had been forced to become prostitutes, and that the people made pies of the flesh of children. We did not know, but we did know that there was death up there in the North."

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